This section is intended to provide the background or context for the embodiments according to the present invention as recited in the claims. What is described herein is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many network applications provide a corresponding client program (also referred to as client, for short) for installation on a user terminal equipment. Regarding a network application providing a client, firstly, the client of the network application needs to be downloaded and installed on a user terminal equipment, then the user may realize the use and experience of the network application on the client through information interaction between the client and server. By providing the network application to the user through the client, some data of the network application can be stored locally at the user terminal equipment along with the client, thereby avoiding the download of all the data from the server every time the user uses the network application, and reducing the amount of data to be downloaded by the user upon using the network application and the occupation of network resources during the use of the network application.
However, as the amount of data involved in the network application becomes increasingly larger, the amount of data of resources contained in the client of the network application is also growing, leading to increasingly longer time required to be spent by the user to download the client, which causes not only inconvenience to the use of the user, but also the loss of many users of the network application during the client downloading process. In order to save the time it takes for the user to download the client so as to allow the user to proceed to the use and experience of the network application as early as possible, some existing network applications employ a micro-client (also referred to as micro-end, for short) technology. Specifically, in the micro-client technology, the client (i.e., micro-end) provided to the user to download only contains resources necessary for the initial use of the network application. During the running of the client, by taking over the file access of the client, when it is found that a resource the client currently requests to access does not exist locally on the client, the resource is downloaded from the server until all resources provided by the network application to the user are downloaded locally to the client, thereby forming a full client on the user terminal equipment. With the micro-client technology, the user may download resources of the network application while using the network application, without having to wait for the completion of the download of a full client to use the network application, thereby reducing the amount of data of initial resources in the client to be downloaded by the user, and saving the time it takes for the user to download the client.
However, as dependency relationships between resources of a network application become increasingly complex, the amount of resources needed to be accessed by the client in certain resource loading processes is also growing. At this point, regarding the resources needed in a current loading process, the client often does not request to access all of the resources at once during the resource loading process, but requests to access a part of the resources respectively in multiple times. Specifically, during the resource loading process, the client first initiates an access request for a part of the resources, parses this part of the resources when they are accessed, and then initiates an access request for a next part of the resources until the resources needed by the current resource loading process have all been downloaded to complete the current resource loading process. For example, as for a three dimensional (3D) online game, compared with a two dimensional (2D) online game, the resources needed to be loaded by the 3D game when the client loads a character or a scene are far more than that of the 2D game. For the same process of loading a character or a scene, the client of the 2D game typically only needs to load picture files, whereas the client of the 3D game needs to first obtain a model description file of the character or the scene, find files such as maps, animations and special effects to be accessed by parsing the description file, and then obtain the files such as maps, animations and special effects thus found, so as to complete the loading of the character or the scene. Furthermore, the character or the scene in the 3D game is typically more complex and may be comprised of multiple interdependent resource parts, each part needs to respectively go through the download and parsing of the description file and the download of the files such as maps, animations and special effects.
It can thus be seen that, for a network application like the 3D online game with such complex dependency relationships between resources, a chain of “parsing-downloading” required to go through in a resource loading process is relatively long; and for a resource loading process performed for the first time, since a client employing the micro-end technology in the prior art only downloads resources it currently requests to access and do not exist locally, the client needs to repeatedly download the resources it requests to access many times according to the “parsing-downloading” chain during the resource loading process, leading to long delay of the resource loading process, and causing a waste of downloading threads as the resources to which access is requested each time cannot usually occupy all of the downloading threads.
Therefore, in the prior art, upon loading resources having complex dependency relationships therebetween for the first time, the network application client employing the micro-end technology only downloads the resources it currently requests to access, not only causing the speed of resource loading of the client being relatively slow and the loading delay being relatively long, but also a waste of downloading threads, which is a very annoying process.
For this reason, a great need exists for an improved resource downloading method and apparatus to avoid the drawbacks of slow speed, long loading delay, and the waste of downloading threads of resource loading of the client caused by the fact that the network application client employing the micro-end technology in the prior art only downloads the resources it currently requests to access.